Corynne McSherry

Corynne McSherry

Legal Director

Corynne McSherry is the Legal Director at EFF, specializing in intellectual property, open access, and free speech issues. Her favorite cases involve defending online fair use, political expression, and the public domain against the assault of copyright maximalists. As a litigator, she has represented Professor Lawrence Lessig, Public.Resource.Org, the Yes Men, and a dancing baby, among others, and one of her first cases at EFF was In re Sony BMG CD Technologies Litigation (aka the "rootkit" case). In 2015 she was named one of California's Top Entertainment Lawyers. She was also named AmLaw's "Litigator of the Week" for her work on Lenz v. Universal. Her policy work includes leading EFF’s effort to fix copyright (including the successful effort to shut down the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA), promote net neutrality, and promote best practices for online expression. In 2014, she testified before Congress about problems with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Corynne comments regularly on digital rights issues and has been quoted in a variety of outlets, including NPR, CBS News, Fox News, the New York Times, Billboard, the Wall Street Journal, and Rolling Stone. Prior to joining EFF, Corynne was a civil litigator at the law firm of Bingham McCutchen, LLP. Corynne has a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz, a Ph.D from the University of California at San Diego, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. While in law school, Corynne published Who Owns Academic Work?: Battling for Control of Intellectual Property (Harvard University Press, 2001).

Deeplinks Posts by Corynne

UPDATE: As of Monday, October 13, the video has been restored to YouTube. The Courier-Journal's executive editor announced on Twitter that the paper has retracted its block. Like clockwork, another news organization is abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s hair-trigger take down process to stifle political commentary just when...

The publishing world may finally be facing its “rootkit scandal.” Two independentreports claim that Adobe’s e-book software, “Digital Editions,” logs every document readers add to their local “library,” tracks what happens with those files, and then sends those logs back to the mother-ship, over the Internet...

Another day, another stupid trademark threat. The target this time? The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting government transparency. As part of its work, it posts detailed information about corporate campaign contributions, information that often includes logos associated with those corporations. One of those corporations, Deloitte Touche...

Brian Carver co-authored this post. Between the net neutrality debate and the Comcast/TWC merger, high-speed Internet access is getting more attention than ever. A lot of that attention is negative, and rightly so: Internet access providers, especially certainverylargeones, have done a pretty...

EFF asked the Second Circuit Court of Appeals today to reject a last-ditch attempt by the Authors Guild to block the Google Books project and rewrite the rules of fair use. This is a long-running case that culminated in a tremendous victory in November. After years of litigation, Judge...

As John Oliver and others have observed, the net neutrality debate is plagued with jargon—“reclassification,” “Title II,” “information service vs. telecommunications service,” and so on. But there’s one bit of jargon we need to hear more often: “forbearance.” As we explained yesterday, forbearance is the process by...

EFF has long been critical of the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to regulate digital technologies and services. We’ve warned against FCC rules and strategies that threatened to (or actually did) give the agency too much power over innovation and user choice. And with good reason: the FCC has a...

This weekend at the U.S. Conference of Mayors annual meeting in Dallas, some mayors will take a strong stand in support of net neutrality. According to an op-ed by Mayors Ed Lee of San Francisco and Ed Murray of Seattle, the city leaders are unveiling a resolution calling on...

Every day cafes, airports, libraries, laundromats, schools and individuals operate “open” Wi-Fi routers, sharing their connection with neighbors and passers-by at no charge. The City of San Francisco recently deployed a free, public Wi-Fi network along a three-mile stretch of Market Street. Sometimes people use those connections for unauthorized activities...